4 ms·
Tangentially related: I find it really ironic how the IM landscape has changed over the decades. At first we had proprietary protocols like ICQ, AIM and MSN. T
by pilif 14y ago
Tangentially related: I find it really ironic how the IM landscape has changed over the decades.
At first we had proprietary protocols like ICQ, AIM and MSN. Then we got clients that reverse-engineered the protocols and supported logging onto multiple networks, which was nice, but the cat-and-mouse game between IM vendors and the people reverse-engineering the protocol was annoying for all parts (i.e clients stopping to work and wasted effort on the IM vendor side).
In all this mess, Jabber was born, trying to standardize IM with the XMPP protocol and the Jabber implementation.
It never flied.
And now we are at a point where all these additional IM services pop up. Ironically, all of them are using XMPP under the hood but all of them go great lengths in adding crypto to make absolutely sure that they are not interoperable.
This is one of the rare cases where a standard was created which everybody is actually following, but which didn't create any kind of interoperability between clients.
It pains me endlessly that I must know whether I can contact person X via iMessage or WhatsApp or now this. And this time it's not even about reverse-engineering protocols. It's just about checking whether your client is a "legitimate" one. There's no technical reason besides actually removing checks and making server names configurable why WhatsApp couldn't talk with iMessage or why GTalk can't talk with WhatsApp and so on.
- runn1ng 14y agoJabber and GTalk are completely interoperable, though.
- ge0rg 14y agoExcept that user name quirks are required to login to gtalk with an xmpp client :(
- technoslut 14y ago>It pains me endlessly that I must know whether I can contact person X via iMessage or WhatsApp or now this. I think the situation is short term though (5 years?). Right now there's a battle for dominance on the mobile front and everyone is taking the proprietary route in an attempt to gain market dominance. AOL had this chance with standardization years ago with AIM but they not only screwed up the entire company but this product as well.
- leeoniya 14y agousing FB's jabber/xmpp servers here for fb-chat, working well.
- bookwormAT 14y agoI'm using a xmpp transport and chat with my facebook contacts through google talk.
- est 14y agoI remember an article on HN says the XMPP creator is inventing a better alternative to XMPP. Anyone remember?
- paduc 14y agoI really don't think IM and SMS-like messaging is the same. IM is real-time and synchronous. The great thing about SMS is the asynchronous nature of the conversations. What's even cooler about iMessage and Whatsapp is that the conversations are stored and you can access them from different devices. I believe there should be a standard to connect services like iMessage, Whatsapp and the likes. XMPP does not permit that.
- pilif 14y agoBoth iMessage and Whatsapp are using XMPP which does in-fact support store and forward of IM messages - hence it's being used by these services. The only additonal part is the background notifications which use Apple's (or Google's on Android) proprietary system. But once you start your client app, they connect to the server via XMPP and use that for message delivery.